The week started with the news of Southern New Hampshire University’s new $10,000 bachelor’s degree program. Recent undergraduate enrollment numbers show the small, Manchester school is now equal in size to UNH in Durham, with a vast majority of its students online.

Enrollment in the network of seven community colleges in New Hampshire nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010. But while overall growth is up, the North Country’s White Mountains Community College is seeing a decline.

Go to a restaurant, school or office in the North Country and chances are you'll find a White Mountains graduate.

You see em at the hospitals, you see em at the doctor's office you see em in the schools.

At a recent cookout behind the red-brick mill building that houses UNH Manchester, senior Derek Burkhardt describes what’s been an eight-year run to get his bachelor’s.

“I actually attended UNH Manchester right out of high school,” says Burkhardt. “But I took some time off in between school to save up some money to be able to afford school, but also to join AmeriCorps. So once I was done with that I came back to continue my education.”

Like many students here Burkhardt says he chose UNH Manchester because that’s where he lives.

Back in 2005, writer David Foster Wallace delivered the commencement address, "This is Water" At Kenyon College. Three years later, the acclaimed novelist committed suicide, but his speech lives on – and has become sort-of The Places You’ll Go of the digital age: shared on social media, and re-published in print around graduation time.

Under the federal Clery Act, colleges and universities are required to report crime statistics. This chart measures total reported forcible sexual offenses involving students, on and off-campus, at each New Hampshire school.

The numbers are not adjusted to account for enrollment, which would allow for a better comparison. For example, with a 2012 undergraduate enrollment of 12,565, UNH sees 1.67 incidences per capita - while, with an enrollment of 6,277, Dartmouth sees 3.82 per capita.

Research suggests as many 95 percent of campus rapes and sexual assaults go unreported.

In 2013, writer, journalist, and college professor George Saunders made a short speech at a graduation ceremony that quickly went viral. He was speaking to the class of 2013 at Syracuse University where he teaches.

We’re continuing our series “A Matter of Degrees” with a look at what it means to be “career ready.” There’s a lot of angst about whether college graduates have the skills they need for today’s workforce, especially science, math, and writing. Some are saying it’s time to rethink which courses students really need, which they don’t, and whether employer expectations are reasonable.

Susy Struble was a 16-year-old high school student when, during a weekend visit to Dartmouth College, she was raped at an off-campus party.

Like many rape victims, Struble chose not to tell anyone about the assault, and two years later, she was back at Dartmouth as a student.

One night during her freshman year, she opened her door to a tall, sandy-haired man. Obviously drunk, he forced his way in, pushed Struble against the wall and tried to kiss her. Struble was able to fend off her attacker, who she realized was the same man who had raped her two years earlier.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration formed a White House Task Force to Protect Students from sexual assault.

Recently that task force announced a series of actions to identify the scope of the problem and help schools with prevention. One of the programs the administration highlighted is the Prevention Innovations initiative at the University of New Hampshire. I talked with Jane Stapleton, a co-director, and asked her to explain the program:

By the mid-April at Keene State College, 13 students remained in professor Kristen Porter-Utley’s freshman biology lecture. Two had dropped out. Keene State's Dean of Sciences and Social Sciences, Gordon Leversee, says this is not unusual in science classes around the country. Here, science students are 2 to 3 times more likely to get a D, an F, to withdraw, or receive an incomplete than students in other classes.

Some of the troubles plaguing higher education are hitting institutions a lot harder in New Hampshire. High public tuition? We have the highest. State aid to public universities? We have among the lowest. For many students, that means they're facing huge debts which will be difficult to repay. That reality is causing students and institutions to reevaluate.

This week NHPR is taking a close look at higher education in the state with our special series A Matter of Degrees. But funding higher ed is a perennial issue that we've been tracking for almost as long as we've been broadcasting.

Earlier this year, the National Labor Relations board ruled that college football players at Northwestern University are considered employees and could form a union. The NCAA and Northwestern University promptly appealed the ruling, arguing that student athletes are not “employees” under federal law. The two sides might see some resolution as early as next week when the house education and workforce committee will hold hearings on the case in DC. The Pay-for-Play model is just one issue in the broader college athletes’ rights movement.

Brendan Riley is an associate professor of English at Columbia College Chicago where he teaches writing, media studies, and literature courses. He has been teaching "Zombies in Popular Media" during January terms since 2007.

We’re continuing our series “A Matter of Degrees” with a look at what it means to be college ready. A common complaint is that freshmen arrive without the fundamentals of writing and math. Meanwhile, the nation’s top tier schools are tougher than ever to get into – and students are playing an admissions game, figuring out the right mix of grades, extra-curriculars and experiences.

For years, universities have been looking for creative ways to drum up cash as their costs increase. The most straightforward way to increase revenue is to bring in more students. And for Plymouth State University, that meant heading south to the Caribbean in a rare partnership deal that some see as controversial.

A 2013 report says 3,095 international students pursued higher education in New Hampshire; that was up 6.3 percent from the previous year. That report also estimates the foreign student expenditure in the state at $103 million dollars. To get an idea about the trend and what it means for schools both here and nationally, I spoke with Karin Fischer, a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education.She covers international education issues.

It was the high school commencement address heard ‘round the world. When English teacher David McCullough, Jr. addressed 2012 graduates from the public high school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, he told them, "You are not special."

We continue our series “A Matter of Degrees” with how families finance higher education. With the price tag ever-rising, and grants scarce, students are shopping-around and cobbling together a variety of funding approaches. Often, that includes taking on more debt, but also re-thinking that traditional model of a four-year, on-campus College experience.

“October, 1947, and the campus is rejuvenated after the slow, sleepy quiescence of the summer weeks,” reads the stoic narrator of an old film reel. “The college town of Hanover throbs excitedly with new life.”

Hanover has been throbbing year-round since the 1970s, though, when Dartmouth became the last Ivy League to accept women.